EXEMPLUM director Paul Roland appeared on the Must Read Alaska podcast hosted by Newsmax contributor John Quick where he discussed the struggles of making a feature film on a meager budget of just $9,500.
Citing 1990s independent filmmakers like Christopher Nolan, Darren Aronofsky, Kevin Smith, and Robert Rodriguez as his sources of inspiration, Roland discussed how filming on an intensely low budget forced him to construct a story around what locations, props, and resources he could get at little to no cost. LISTEN BELOW:
“When you have so little money that you’re working with and so few resources, you have no artistic freedom. You have to construct your story around what you know you can get free or relatively cheap. I knew that I could get a Catholic church for free. I knew I could get at least a bar or a restaurant for free. I knew I could shoot guerilla filmmaking in various parts of the city,” Roland told Quick.
“So, I always had in my head this idea about a Catholic priest that records his confessions. I didn’t know where that would take me or what kind of story that would be, but that was in the back of my head. So when I started writing the script and pairing the story with what I knew I could get for free, that’s how the story really came about,” he added.
On the challenge of creating an emotionally urgent and engaging film on such a small budget, Roland said that his time spent writing previous screenplays honed his ability to give the story a sense of urgency.
“Because I had spent a lot of time writing scripts with the mindset of artistic freedom (big budget scripts), it allowed me to … think big with the emotions. I knew how to create a sense of urgency to the film and get creative with how I utilized the locations and the editing and play up the emotions of the characters and allow that to speak rather than allowing the budget to overtake things,” Roland said.
Roland even said he would some days have no idea if a desired location would come through until the last minute.
“There are locations that I didn’t even know I was going to get until two days before,” he said. “I would finish up a weekend filming this thing and I had no idea where we were going to be at next week. If we were going to get what we needed, no clue. There would be three places that would fall through and then something would come through at the last minute. It’s a wild experience.”
The full interview with Roland and John Quick can be heard here.
It was great to have director @Prolandfilms on the @MustReadAlaska show today to talk about his feature film Exemplum. He recently won Best Director from the @PasFilmFest.
Check out @BreitbartNews @BabylonBeePod for other news on Exemplum. https://t.co/PtN6Zen93Y
— John Quick (@_Jonathan_Quick) April 3, 2023
EXEMPLUM combines classic Film Noir with Medieval morality tales and plunges the two genres into a paranoid technological thriller that centers on a young, media-savvy Catholic priest who teams up with a mysterious hacker to blackmail a wealthy parishioner with secret recordings of his confessions.
“EXEMPLUM is engaging,” wrote Rotten Tomatoes Top Critic James Berardinelli of Reelviews. “It points to Roland as having taken a promising first step.”
Conservative film critic Christian Toto of Hollywood in Toto also hailed EXEMPLUM as a “compelling tale of a priest’s fall from grace.”
Watch EXEMPLUM for FREE on Tubi or rent a commercial-free, high-quality stream at VIMEO On Demand.
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